THE AEGEAN: a MAGIC CIRCLE the Sunday Times, 23 May 1999
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THE AEGEAN: A MAGIC CIRCLE The Sunday Times, 23 May 1999 Amorgos, Sifnos, Serifos, Sikinos, Naxos, Folegandros... the special music of the Cyclades. I had been thinking of making a trip out to some of these less touristy islands where there might still be some element of Greekness in the experience. When I found the only place I could get a last-minute flight to was Mykonos, my heart sank! Package tours and cruise ships, the gay Mecca of the eastern Mediterranean… the epitome of tourist hell I imagined. I arrived on June 5, eight days short of the 38th anniversary of my only other visit. My diary for that occasion says: "Some 40 or 50 tourists. Don't notice them. Seems funny after two months (I had been wandering around Greece) to see women in trousers and scarves and men in shorts. First seaside-type tourists I've seen." Things have changed, obviously. The town has spread. The terraces overlooking the harbour where I pitched my tent have long disappeared under the foundations of villas and hotels. Rooms cost upwards of Drs 10,000 (£21), whereas then they cost Drs 10. Ferries dock in the harbour; then they anchored at sea and fishing boats came out to fetch us ashore. There are now more motorbike rental shops than grocery stores, more bars and restaurants than churches and more jewellery and dress shops than all other categories put together. And you need to multiply the numbers of people by a factor of several hundred, even for early June. My intention had been to leave immediately. There was, I discovered, a boat for Naxos within an hour of my arrival. Still in western train-catching mode, I hurried down to the harbour, only to find there was no ticket office or information available there. I dashed to the first travel agent. "No boats to Naxos today. Tomorrow afternoon." "Isn't there any other way to get there? Aren't there any Dolphins?" (Dolphins are the universally applied name in Greece for hydrofoils.) "You'll have to ask at the Dolphin office." It was practically next door. “Yes, there's a Dolphin at three o'clock and a boat at five." "Can you tell me," I asked, "why one travel agent tells you there is no boat and the next one sells you a ticket?" "They only know about the boats they represent." "But isn't there any central source of information? I've got this timetable from England…” They laughed. "People publish books, but we don't know ourselves what's happening from one week to the next." That was not the end of the saga. The Dolphin never came. At 8pm we learnt that it had sucked a paragadhi into its filter, one of those long fishermen's lines with thousands of subsidiary hooks. I used my enforced stay to get on with some exploring. I turned into the old lanes behind the waterfront that still curves so prettily round the bay. No more than a couple of metres wide and paved with flagstones outlined in whitewash, they wind their labyrinthine way between walls of radiant whiteness, articulated by the garish splash of bougainvillea and the blue of shutter and stair, the blue the Greeks call thalassi – the blue of sea and sky, an azure purity that roofs the island world. Here and there the vaulted coolness of a chapel provides a haven from the bustle of the street. On the seaward side, the five famous windmills look down on a strip of beach where the blue waves break along the walls of balconied houses in a scene of such photogenic prettiness you would not dare to invent it. When evening falls, it brings not the violet hour that suffuses the hills in other parts of Greece, but something softer, a blush from within that turns the houses a golden, creamy buff. The night owls, showered and oiled from the beach, begin to appear. Outside darkened doors, women sit and chat, their lives separated as by an invisible screen from the tourist crowds that pass within arm's length. And then it's restaurant time, followed by bar and clubbing time, right through to daybreak. It is not what you would call a typical Greek village, but even I, through the fog of my prejudice, could feel a certain buzz of excitement in the air. The only time when the place does still seem like a village is early in the morning, when a small market appears along the quay, and in the cafés the older generation, sailor- capped, thickset and weather-beaten, take their coffee, a different breed from the sons and daughters who have grown up on the richer pickings of tourism. Next day the wind was too much for the Dolphins and I had to go to Naxos by ship. As in Mykonos, the main town – the khora, as the island capitals are always called – has sold out to tourism. Assailed by women touting their "rooms", I made straight for the bus to Filoti, a village high in the interior among olive groves and vineyards, where tourism has made little impact. Commerce and social life take place along the road in the deep shade of plane trees; domestic life belongs to the steep stairs and alleys that climb the foothills of Mount Zas, at 1,000m the highest point of the Cyclades. Having found a room and taken a nap – a crucial and delicious habit in this climate, for that way you get two days in one: the first for work, swimming, sightseeing, the second for hanging out in the cool of the night – I set out to climb it. It was about six o'clock and the evening sun was beginning to gild the stones and the rampant vines and the low, spiny bushes of sage and spurge, broom and cistus, all starting to dry out now in the summer heat. The path starts about half an hour above the village, by a chapel on the road to Dhanakos. It is one and a half to two hours to the top and an hour to come down. The summit is at the end of a broad stony ridge, where the ground falls sheer in a dramatic precipice. In the west, Paros and Andiparos lie across a burnished strait, with Naxos town winking in the sun on the nearer shore. On a clear day you could see half the Aegean. You get a powerful sense of place from walking the land like this, and of history, too. There has been no industry, no large-scale farming, no intervention by machinery. The landscape is today as it was 5,000 years ago, when the Cycladic civilisation fashioned those translucent marble figurines of women and lyre-players. The paths you tread are the paths people walked in Roman, Byzantine and Turkish times. The islands you look out upon are those that Homer wrote about, and Herodotus and Thucydides. Next morning, as the plangent cadences of the Sunday service resonated under the plane trees, I walked through the olive groves to the village of Khalki with its thousand-year-old church and brooding Pirgos Barozzi, one of the big fortified houses built by the Venetians who ruled these islands from 1200 to 1500. Beyond, the path climbed through a sun-baked, rocky valley, past semi-troglodytic buildings to the jagged hill of Pano Kastro, crowned with ruins from classical and Venetian times. Not far below lies the oasis of Ano Potamia, where a powerful spring gushes up by the church. I sat in the shade beneath white oleander and blue trumpets of morning glory and sipped a coffee. At another table, a neat mustachioed man in a loud shirt recounted theatrical stories of hunting prowess to a group of friends: "...daka-douka... the dog skidded... I had my eyes 14 [i.e. very alert] ...I fired once, bam- boum, I fired twice... the hare spun five times in the air.” Sparrows chirped. The spring purled and gurgled. Worry beads clicked. They can keep their paradise beaches, I thought. An hour later, by a beautiful signposted path, I came down to the next valley, where, in a glade of gardens and fruit trees loud with the clamour of crickets, lies a kouros, a colossal statue of a young man. Half-formed and spotted with lichen, it has lain here, where marble once was quarried, for 26 centuries. Somewhere nearby it has a twin, which I could not find. The road and bus route pass nearby, but the old path still exists, following the valley down to the villages of Mili and Kouronohori, lush with running water and gardens of beans and marrows, peaches, pomegranates, lemon and orange trees. Back in Naxos town I explored the vaulted lanes and steps of the Venetian citadel, whose nobler houses still bear their families' coats of arms. I came by chance on the marble entrance of the Hotel Pantheon, an island hotel in the old style, furnished with wooden sofas, lace and old photos. I had coffee with the elderly proprietors and we lamented the too-rapid changes that tourism has brought: the abandonment of the old ways, of all other activities. “They gave up their potatoes [Naxos was renowned for its potatoes] and built hotels, with no knowledge or tradition. At Ayia Anna they have built like a workers' housing estate." Ayia Anna is the nearest of the stunning beaches that stretch south from Naxos town. I went and had a look. The sand is as beautiful as ever, but there has been a lot of random development.